Self Organized Waste Management

We will introduce you to some projects and challengers. This is the first post – a project by the garbologist Alice Audrey Grindhammer about self-organized waste management in Palestine:

Alice Grindhammer is working together with Lajee Youth Center, Hannes Kunstreich, Akram Dweikat and Johanna von Toggenburg on a hyper-local recycling infrastructure in Aida Camp in Palestine. The background to this project is that currently waste is still being burnt in the streets on a daily basis in Aida Camp. And since more than 70% of the waste in Aida is bio waste they are working on that stream to start with.

The goal is to design and implement a simple and elegant circular economy for the bio waste. So that every kilo of recycled biomass means less waste on the street, valuable fertilizer… and one head of lettuce more.

Why one lettuce more? Because in parallel, Lajee Youth Center is scaling up rooftop gardening in the camp. Both projects go really well hand-in-hand for a more sustainable life in the community. A pilot phase was successfully launched in Aida and now they want to begin a beta test and scale up. And prove that composting has the potential to be handled by a self organized community or community micro-businesses. And that communities can create models which are disruptive and scalable, and at the same time contribute to solving pressing social and environmental issues.